We All Go a Little Mad

Sometimes: Alfred
Hitchcock, American
Psychoanalysis, and the
Construction of the
Cold War Psychopath
Robert Genter

Abstract: This article explores the image of the psychopath in Alfred

Hitchcocks 1960 lm Psycho. The famed directors portrayal of a psycho-
logically damaged young man connected with a much larger discussion
over political and sexual deviance in the early Cold War, a discussion that
cantered on the image of the psychopath as the dominant threat to national
security and that played upon normative assumptions about adolescent
development and mother-son relations.

Keywords: psychopath, Alfred Hitchcock, authoritarianism, deviance,

sexuality, criminality, psychoanalysis

Resume : Le present article jette un coup dil sur limage du psychopathe

du lm Psycho (1960) dAlfred Hitchcock. La representation par le cele`bre
directeur dun jeune homme ayant subi des dommages psychologiques,
raccordee a` une discussion beaucoup plus elargie sur la deviance politique
et sexuelle au debut de la guerre froide, une discussion centree sur limage
du psychopathe comme une menace dominante pour la securite nationale
et qui a joue sur les hypothe`ses normatives au sujet du developpement de
ladolescent et des relations me`re-ls.

Mots cles : psychopathe, Alfred Hitchcock, autoritarisme, deviance,

sexualite, criminalite, psychanalyse

In April 1959, Peggy Robertson, production assistant to Alfred

Hitchcock passed along to the famous director, a New York Times
book review by Anthony Boucher of a new crime novel, Psycho,

6 Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne detudes americaines 40, no. 2, 2010
doi: 10.3138/cras.40.2.133
 by renowned horror writer Robert Bloch. Bouchers enthusiastic
review of what he referred to as an icily terrifying yet believable
history of mental illness (Boucher 25) encouraged Hitchcock to
instruct his agent at MCA to purchase the screen rights. Blochs
horric tale of a forty-year-old motel keeper, who had, years prior
to the events of the novel, murdered his mother and then inter-
Canadian Review of American Studies 40 (2010)

nalized her personality to relieve his guilt and who then directed
his murderous rage onto helpless motel occupants, was the perfect
vehicle for Hitchcocks lifelong interest in murder, deviant sexual-
ity, and psychopathology. In a number of lms, including Shadow
of a Doubt and Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock had already linked
perversion and criminal behaviour and had used the language of
psychoanalysis as an explanatory tool. But Psycho, with its grizzly
shower scene, seemed too audacious for Hitchcocks conservative
studio producers at Paramount.1 Consequently, in order to get
the lm made, the famed director had to scale back his normal
production costs and dispense with his usual, well-paid lm stars.
Although he received favourable coverage from the New York Times
during the shooting of his lm, Hitchcock was mostly lambasted
by critics for failing to reach the high standard he had previously
set (Coe 20). Echoing the sentiments of many, New York Times
134 lm critic Bosley Crowther called Hitchcocks lm old-fashioned
melodramatics (37).

But Psycho struck a chord with audiences nonetheless. With $9.5

million in ticket sales, Hitchcocks lm ranked behind only Ben-Hur
in terms of domestic gross (Rebello 164). In part, the success of
the lm stemmed from Hitchcocks famous publicity stunts. He
lmed a highly successful trailer that featured the director giving a
tongue-in-cheek tour of the Bates motel. Hitchcock also demanded
that theatre owners refuse to seat ticket buyers after the start of the
feature, preserving an air of mystery around the lm. But more
importantly, Hitchcocks lm spoke to a much larger social anxiety.
As one audience member explains in a letter to the New York Times
in which she castigates critics like Crowther for failing to recognize
the importance of the lm, to deny that human beings have
certain animal-like instincts and sexual impulses, thereby creating
certain disturbances and problems in our very sophisticated civili-
zation, is to irt with a disaster far greater than an atomic war
(Balin). Indeed, Hitchcocks portrayal of a psychologically damaged,
sexually and morally confused young man connected with a much
larger discussion, in the early Cold War, of political and sexual
deviance, a discussion that centred on the image of the psychopath
as the dominant threat to American security. In so doing, the lm
played upon normative assumptions concerning adolescent develop-
ment, family structures, motherson relations, and sexual practices,
conservative assumptions that reected not merely Hitchcocks own
personal anxieties but also larger cultural ones.

In fact, Psycho was just the most visible document to issue a warn-
ing about the deviant behaviour lurking within each individual. By
1960, policy makers had already alerted the public to the dangers
mental illness posed to the body politic. Under the auspices of the
National Mental Health Study Act of 1955, the US Congress, for
instance, established the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and
Health, a research organization designed to collect nationwide data
on the psycho-therapeutic profession. One of the eleven mono-
graphs produced by the Commission was a study that polled 2,460
Americans about their psychological well-being. Published the
same year that Hitchcock released his feature, Americans View Their
Mental Health revealed that, despite differences in class position or
educational level, most Americans felt a persistent undercurrent
of isolation and a sense of helplessness in the face of events
135
(Gurin, Veroff, and Field xiii). In general effect, the authors
declare, the GurinVeroffField monograph supports the com-

Revue canadienne detudes americaines 40 (2010)

munity surveys showing a high prevalence of persons with various
psychiatric or psychological illnesses or maladjustments (xxv). But
the major concern for mental health professionals was not merely
the neurotic tics of average citizens; the more immediate concern,
as journalists who translated such research into the pages of Life,
Good Housekeeping, and Ladies Home Journal explained, was with
serious mental disease, that is, those grave illnesses, such as
schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychoses, [and] paranoia (Davis
13), that left individuals disconnected from reality. More impor-
tantly, while many such illnesses had consequences only for the
sick individual, those who were psychopathic personalities posed
a threat to the American public. The mentally ill deserved sym-
pathy and treatment, according to commentators; the psychopath
needed incarceration and surveillance. Consequently, by the time
Psycho premiered in 1960, the image of the psychopath had already
inltrated the American imagination, an image that linked concerns
over national security to lingering worries over political behaviour
and deviant sexuality.
 The Problem of Mental Health in America
In 1955, Newsweek declared that the U.S. is without a doubt the
most psychologically oriented, or psychiatrically oriented nation in
the world and noted that the almost compulsive search for mental
health now goes on in the nations art, in its schools, in its pillows,
Canadian Review of American Studies 40 (2010)

even in its religion (The Mind 59). Americas Freud obsession,

as one European commentator explained, was quite remarkable
given the resistance, if not outright dismissal, Freud received almost
fty years prior when he delivered a series of public lectures at
Clark University in 1909 (Gorer 5). But the bullets of World War II
quickly changed the professional status of psychoanalysis, if not
psychology, in the United States as a whole. Recognizing that
the treatment of veterans with psychiatric disabilities from the
previous war had cost approximately one billion dollars, govern-
mental ofcials attached psychiatrists to military divisions to advise
in the early detection of neuropsychiatric patients. As the army dis-
tributed more than 9 million copies of Psychology for the Fighting
Man and began training thousands of medical ofcers in the rudi-
ments of psychology, the available number of psychiatrists tried
to handle a growing case load. The Neuropsychiatry Consultants
136 Division of the Surgeon Generals Ofce, for example, reported
that, between January 1942 and June 1945, there were approxi-
mately 1 million hospital admissions from the army for neuro-
psychiatric disorders (Appel 433). By the wars end, psychologists
had served in seven theatres, nine service commands, ten armies,
and hundreds of evacuation hospitals (Moskowitz 102).

After the end of hostilities, the psychoanalytic profession vaulted

into public discourse on this wave of enthusiasm. Those psychia-
trists who had practised in wartime service noted that the high
rate of draftees rejected for neuropsychiatric disorders demonstrated
that mental illness was a serious health problem. For instance, air
force psychiatrists Roy Grinker and John Spiegel argued that [their]
experiences as military psychiatrists serving combat soldiers were
perfect training for the understanding of the psychology and psy-
chopathology of people under the stresses of ordinary civilian life
(427). In 1946, William Menninger and a number of other members
of the American Psychiatric Association formed the Group for the
Advancement of Psychiatry, a pressure organization to encourage a
more prominent role for psychiatrists in promoting mental health. As
Menninger explained in the pages of the New York Times, Psycho-
analysis has contributed enormously to the understanding of
normal behaviour, and hence serves as the only logical basis
for preventive psychiatrya valid mental hygiene (50). Federal
ofcials who had witnessed the efcacy of psychoanalysis in pro-
moting the war effort were more than willing to enlist the aid of
psychiatrists in confronting similar problems in civilian life. Indeed,
the signing of the National Mental Health Act in 1946 marked
the ofcial beginning of the romance of American psychology
(Herman). Promoted by psychiatrist Robert Felix, the director of
the Division of Mental Hygiene of the US Public Health Services,
and by Congressman J. Percy Priest and Senator Claude Pepper,
the National Mental Health Act dramatically increased funding
for research into the aetiology of mental disorders and created the
National Institute of Mental Health to encourage growth in the
number of practising psychiatrists.

By the 1950s, psychoanalysis had reached what historian Nathan

Hale refers to as its golden age in the United States (257). The
most important task was to make individuals aware of the extent
of psychological illness and to end the stigmatization attached to
therapy. In 1946, for instance, Time magazine argued that about
8,000,000 U.S. citizens were neurotic or worse (For the Psyche
137
73), and nearly ten years later Newsweek placed the number at
ten million (The Mind 61). In response, countless psychoanalysts,

Revue canadienne detudes americaines 40 (2010)

including Dr. George Stevenson of the National Association for
Mental Health and Dr. Marie Nyswander of the National Addiction
Research Project, appeared in the pages of national magazines
to remake ideas about psychiatry (Nyswander 90). Countless
features transformed the stoic, European analyst into a benevolent,
native-born therapist, making treatment seem more ordinary.
Newsweek, for instance, offered advice on how to select a psycholo-
gist and tried to answer worries about the nancial costs of long-
term treatment (Talking Doctors). A number of Hollywood lms
similarly portrayed psychoanalysis in a positive light, featuring
sensitive therapists helping troubled characters nd balance [Lady
in the Dark (1944), The Snake Pit (1948), and The Three Faces of
Eve (1957)] or using psychoanalytic themes to explain the neurotic
behaviour of characters [Rebel without a Cause (1955) and The Seven
Year Itch (1955)]. Alfred Hitchcock himself offered sympathetic
accounts of analytic treatment in Spellbound (1945) and The Wrong
Man (1956). Even the most popular book in post-war America,
Dr. Benjamin Spocks Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care
(1946), translated Freudian ideas into an accessible vernacular.
 National Character Studies and the Image of the Psychopath
The ood of writings on psychoanalysis was not initiated simply by
national concerns over the neurotic tics of average citizens. In large
measure, interest in this old discipline was sparked by the myriad
European analysts who sought refuge during the war. As historian
Canadian Review of American Studies 40 (2010)

Eli Zaretsky has noted, America became the unofcial capital of the
psychoanalytic community in the 1940s, as famed theorists, such
as Helen Deutsch, Heinz Hartmann, and Theodor Reik, helped
to found institutes in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago (276).
Scarred by witnessing European civilization collapse under fascism,
these analysts also brought the pessimism of Freuds Civilization
and Its Discontents to America, helping to alert their seemingly
nave counterparts to the spectre of collectivist politics. As the
vocabulary of psychoanalysis seeped into every academic dis-
course, offering new analytic tools to sociologists and political
scientists, these analysts interjected a larger concern with group
psychology. Soon, American intellectuals, particularly those anthro-
pologists associated with the culture and personality school, used
psychoanalysis to dissect the character of those nations partici-
pating in the war. Works such as Margaret Meads And Keep Your
138 Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (1942) and Ruth
Benedicts The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese
Culture (1946) treated someones characterhis or her behaviour,
attitudes, moral direction, and so onas the product of the shared
traits of a given society during the course of its development. The
assumption guiding such works was that particular child-rearing
practices reinforced particular psychological traits (oral, anal, or
genital xations) that led to the formation of particular character
types. After the war, books such as David Riesmans The Lonely
Crowd and Geoffrey Gorers The American People: A Study in National
Character used Freudian concepts to describe the American charac-
ter, pointing to everything from the economic dislocations of the
Great Depression to the spread of mass culture in order to explain
deviant behaviour. Indeed, the psychoanalytic and sociological
literature of the 1950s was littered with a host of character types
the rebel, the juvenile delinquent, the homosexual, and so on
character types that had supposedly been produced by certain
distortions in psychological development.

In the early Cold War, however, most studies of character typology

focused on the personality make-up of those individuals who had
fallen prey to totalitarian ideologies. Beginning with the ground-
breaking work of political scientist Harold Lasswell, who, in a
series of books including Psychopathology and Politics (1930), had
argued that political beliefs were nothing more than the unconscious
projection of personal turmoil onto the public sphere, American
intellectuals, in works such as Gabriel Almonds The Appeals of
Communism (1954) and Hadley Cantrils Politics of Despair (1958),
dissected the psychological appeal of both communism and fascism.
The most comprehensive post-war study of the irrational nature of
modern man was The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a collaborative
investigation commissioned by the American Jewish Committee
and authored by Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel
Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford. Arguing that political deviance
was not governed by rational calculations about economic inequal-
ities, the authors of The Authoritarian Personality used the tools of
psychoanalysis, including projective testing and depth psychology,
to unearth the unconscious motivations of party members. Accord-
ing to them, the authoritarian personality exhibited a host of traits:
a submissive attitude towards authority, an aggressive reaction
to outsiders, and a lack of understanding of international events.
Although these traits were not comprehensive of all the features
of this personality pattern, they did, according to the books
139
authors, form a more or less enduring structure in the person that
renders him receptive to antidemocratic propaganda (Adorno et

Revue canadienne detudes americaines 40 (2010)

al. 228). Such receptivity was linked to the psychological weakness
of the individual; in particular, the inability to balance the con-
icting demands that issued from internal and external forces. In
order to understand the nature of this apparent ego weakness and
unearth the associated character structure, the authors turned to the
concept of the psychopathic personality.

The concept of the psychopathic personality originated in the

early nineteenth century with the work of British physician J.C.
Prichard, who formulated the notion of moral insanity to refer
to a wide range of mental deciencies that led to socially reprehen-
sible behaviours.2 According to Prichards ndings, certain individ-
uals lacked the natural feelings of respect and responsibility and
therefore lacked the ability to restrain themselves from socially
unacceptable behaviour, a broad categorization that encompassed
almost all psychological maladies. Prichard, like those who followed
him, argued that moral insanity had hereditary origins, giving rise in
later years to the concept of constitutional psychopathic inferiority.
In the early twentieth century, a number of psychiatrists in America
including, Adolf Meyer and D.K. Henderson, rened the concept
 by studying criminals and delinquents, offering a range of physio-
logical sources of the condition, including mental capacity, body
type, neural structure, and brain disorders. But the most substan-
tive research came during World War II, done in organized ways
by psychiatrists working in veteran hospitals and in less ofcial
ways by psychiatrists taking eld notes in the forward echelons
Canadian Review of American Studies 40 (2010)

of the war. As rejections at induction centresfor instance, in

Bostonfor those recruits diagnosed as psychopathic personali-
ties reached 31 per cent and as the rate of psychiatric casualties
labelled anti-social personalities (Arieff and Rotman 158) almost
equalled those with neurotic disorders, studies of the psychopath
littered psychoanalytic journals. The most famous research came
from Benjamin Karpman, the chief therapist at St. Elizabeths
Hospital, who, in a series of books in the 1940s, distinguished
between the symptomatic type, who exhibited certain psychopathic
characteristics generated by an underlying mental conict, and
the idiopathic type, who exhibited no specic psychogenesis for
his behaviour. Similarly, the Manual of Military Neuropsychiatry
explained that research into psychopathology in army cadets had
revealed that hereditary causes were less signicant than environ-
mental impacts, research that was echoed by additional reports
140 from the Cornell Medical College and the Rehabilitation Service of
the New York State Hospital (see Malamud; Dunn; Heuser).

After the war, the psychoanalytic community tried to provide a

proper classication in terms of behaviour and symptoms for the
psychopathic personality. As Benjamin Karpman notes, by the 1950s
the term had become an over-cluttered wastebasket (524). In
general, the psychopath was characterized by a stunted psycho-
logical development that produced sexually chaotic behaviour, in-
cluding excessive masturbation and homosexuality, and by morally
decient behaviour ranging from petty crimes to excessive violence.
Equally important, the psychopath was distinguished from the
ordinary criminal due to a lack of guilt and a failure to commit
crimes for denable reasons. Despite generally undisturbed reason-
ing capabilities, the psychopath lacked any motivation for his
actions. What made the psychopath difcult to diagnose and there-
fore to recognize in general was the mask of sanity (Cleckley) he
or she wore. As Hervey Cleckley explains, in his 1941 book The
Mask of Sanity, which set the framework for post-war discussions
of the psychopath, We are dealing here not with a complete
man at all but with something that suggests a subtly constructed
reex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly
(424). The psychopath was distinguished only by an underlying
emotional instability that produced an oscillation between oppos-
ing behaviours. The psychopath was driven at times to overrule
any internalized voice of authority and to yield to impulsive
desires, while at other times slavishly following social rules and
engaging in mechanical behaviour. Similarly, at times, the psycho-
path exhibited moments of sensitivity but, at other times, especially
when confronted with anything disagreeable, he or she was prone
to violent outbursts. Such an open-ended classication led to an
almost immeasurable list of personality types deemed psycho-
pathic; as psychiatrist Harry Lipton says, The group includes a
heterogeneous lot of criminals, many emotionally unstable, inade-
quate personalities, some paranoid personalities, many alcoholics,
drug addicts, pathological liars, swindlers, and sexual psycho-
paths (585). Described as affectively cold and paranoid but often
sensitive and overly optimistic, the psychopath exhibited endlessly
diverse symptoms, leading Walter Bromberg, the senior psychia-
trist at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, to divide the personality into
numerous sub-classications, including the paranoid psychopath,
the aggressive psychopath, and the psychopathic swindler
(534).
141
Due to the extent of his emotional disturbances, the psychopath

Revue canadienne detudes americaines 40 (2010)

was, therefore, seen as the delinquent counterpart of the authori-
tarian personality, both exhibiting the combined traits of sadism
and mental rigidity. As the authors of The Authoritarian Personality
put it, Here go the hoodlums and rowdies, plug-uglies, torturers,
and all those who do the dirty work of a fascist movement (763).
In the absence of any organized movement to channel aggres-
sion and, therefore, of any externalized super-ego to which to
adhere, the latent authoritarian personality lapsed into psycho-
pathic behaviour, allowing destructive urges to come to the fore
in an overt, non-rationalized way (763). Both personalities, how-
ever, were guided by pre-Oedipal urges, clinging to the omni-
potence fantasy of very early infancy (763). Additional research
conrmed the link between psychopathology and authoritarianism.
A 1955 study conducted by psychologists at Vassar College of
225 female college students revealed that feelings of inadequacy
leading to hostility to others was the dominant trait of both psycho-
paths and authoritarians (M. Freedman, Webster, and Sanford). A
similar study of 712 rst-year students at San Diego State College
demonstrated that certain psychopathological factors, such as
compulsive behaviour and feelings of isolation, were present in
 the authoritarian syndrome ( Jensen). Less systematic accounts
came from G.M. Gilbert, prison psychologist at the Nuremberg
trials, in his 1950 book The Psychology of Dictatorship, and from
Nathan Ackerman, one of the co-founders of the family therapy
movement, in his 1958 book The Psychodynamics of Family Life (see
also Bender).
Canadian Review of American Studies 40 (2010)

The individual most responsible for solidifying the connection

between political deviance and psychopathology was Robert Lindner,
the chief psychiatrist at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Penn-
sylvania. Lindners treatment of criminal personalities resulted in
the publication of several case histories of his patients, including
his successful analysis of a young criminal, Harold, as detailed in
his 1944 book Rebel without a Cause. As both an armed robber and
sexual deviant, Harold was, according to Lindner, a classic example
of the criminal psychopath, that is, someone unable to delay the
pleasures of gratication (2). His troubled childhood, especially
his abusive relationship with his father, had left Harold with no
paternal role model with which to identify. He consequently lacked
the psychic agency necessary to check his latent aggression and
this had contributed to his psychopathic behaviour. As Lindner
142 explains, There seems to be little doubt that the special features
of psychopathic behavior derive from a profound hatred of the
father, analytically determined by way of the inadequate resolu-
tion of the Oedipus conict (7). The attendant characteristics of
psychopathslack of remorse, antisocial actions, aberrant behaviour,
etc.were products of a crippled super-ego. Moreover, Harolds
failed psychological growth had made him a prime candidate for
afliation with totalitarian organizations. According to Lindner,
The psychopath is not only a criminal; he is the embryonic
Storm-Trooper (14). Unable to nd an outlet for his aggression and
desperate for identication with a father gure, such a damaged
personality easily fell prey to the allure of communism and fascism;
indeed, in a series of case histories of political deviants collected
in Must You Conform? and The Fifty-Minute Hour, Lindner detailed
the psychopathic behaviour he saw as the essence of both these
contentious political forms (Must 117).

The Spread of Sexual Psychopath Laws

In the most famous court case of the early Cold War, former
State Department ofcial Alger Hiss, who was accused by the
self-confessed ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers of procuring
government documents for Soviet agents, charged that his accusers
past membership in the Communist party demonstrated Chamberss
mental instability. To prove his claim, Hiss enlisted the counsel of
psychiatrist Carl Binger, who testied that Chambers was a classic
example of a psychopathic personality, that is, someone who
demonstrated the combined symptoms of paranoid thinking and
abnormal emotionality (Conklin 1). Although Hiss was convicted
of perjury in 1950, the famed HissChambers case only furthered
the association between political and social deviance. Whispers
about Chamberss odd sexual behaviours, including alleged homo-
sexual encounters, helped to link the image of the psychopath to
sexual deviance as well. Indeed, while European analysts initiated
this discourse on the psychopath due to concerns with political
behaviour, their fears were soon translated into a panic over sexual
deviance. Beginning in the late 1940s, community leaders and
mental health professionals warned about a dramatic increase in sex
crimes, a nationwide panic that eventually led twenty-nine states to
enact sexual psychopath laws ( Jenkins 34). In a 1948 Saturday
Evening Post article, journalist David Wittels summarizes the per-
ceived epidemic: No one knows or can even closely estimate how
many such creatures there are, but at least tens of thousands of
143
them are loose in this country today . . . They are not necessarily
sex maniacs; they merely cannot control the dark impulses which

Revue canadienne detudes americaines 40 (2010)

are latent in all of us (31). Referred to in a litany of state legislative
reports, including the Report of the Massachusetts Commission for the
Investigation of the Prevalence of Sex Crimes (1948) and the Report of
the Illinois Commission on Sex Offenders (1953), the sexual psycho-
path seemed to haunt the American landscape.

Echoing an earlier concern in the 1930s, this national panic was

triggered by a number of related social transformations. As several
historians have recently argued, the explosion in state legislation
about the sexual psychopath did not reect any actual increase in
sex crimes (E. Freedman). Instead, such worries were related to a
wider concern with the social and economic dislocations caused by
World War II and to the anxieties created by the pressures of the
early Cold War. In large measure, the fear of political subversion
(either by trespassing Soviet agents or by morally decient Ameri-
cans converted to the Communist cause) driving McCarthyism
produced a corresponding fear of mental contagiona fear that a
psychologically weak nation was vulnerable to noxious inuences.
This concern over the sexual psychopath, which soon dovetailed
with a concern over the homosexual menace, was generated by
 disruptions to traditional family arrangements, gender roles, and
sexual practices during the Great Depression and World War II
(DEmilio 65). The emergence in the 1940s of a substantial gay com-
munity in major urban areas combined, with growing evidence,
such as Alfred Kinseys research on American sexual behaviours,
of declining sexual mores created a larger panic about the vicissi-
Canadian Review of American Studies 40 (2010)

tudes of individual psychological development, a panic that tied in

closely with the political scare of McCarthyism. Indeed, the author-
itarian personality was always coded as sexually confused and was
diagnosed as a product of the same psychological failings as those
of sexual deviants. For instance, due to his unresolved castration
anxiety, Harold, the criminal psychopath in Lindners Rebel Without
a Cause, is depicted not only as a latent authoritarian but also as
a latent homosexual, a nding echoed by most studies of political
deviance. As Theodor Adorno, one of the authors of The Authori-
tarian Personality, explains, Totalitarianism and homosexuality
belong together (Adorno, Minima 46). Equally important, rising
female employment during and after the war, particularly for
middle-class, married women, seemed to have put the stability of
the family in question, prompting widespread pressure for a return
to traditional domestic roles (Cuordileone). Womens increased
144 participation in the public sphere was countered by widespread
warnings about ubiquitous sexual dangers and criminal acts in
American society. As Colliers magazine warned, Rape has in-
creased 200 percent in the past twenty years, the most phenomenal
increase of any major category of crime. The hoodlum rapist lurks
in the foliage of a dark street waiting for a woman to walk home
from the bus-stop (qtd. in Jenkins 53). In the midst of such
sexual and political chaos, notions of the dangerous individual
emergeda sexually and politically confused psychopath who,
because of an inability to restrain his desires, posed a threat to the
body politic.

In response to this panic, state legislatures passed a litany of sexual

psychopath laws in the 1950s. In most states, trial judges had
the authority, in cases involving criminal offences, to adjourn
or suspend proceedings if there was probable cause to believe the
defendant suffered from a sexual pathology.3 Mandatory medical
examination by the staff of the state public health department was
then ordered. If psychiatrists determined the defendant was a
sexual psychopath, he was then conned in a state mental hospital
or the psychiatric division of a state penitentiary for an indeter-
minate duration. Under the doctrine of parens patriae, the power of
guardianship over those deemed dangerous was bestowed on the
state. States differed on the classication of such persons (the most
common designations included the sexual psychopath, the sexually
dangerous person, the mentally abnormal sex offender, and the
psychopathic personality); states also differed on the list of com-
pulsions that characterized a sexual pathology (common offences
included rape, incest, homosexuality, transvestism, exhibitionism,
voyeurism, and masturbation). The sexual psychopath was usually
dened as any person with an existing mental disorder combined
with a propensity to commit any type of sex crime. The 1958
Vermont statute, for instance, dened psychopathic personalities
as persons who by a habitual course of misconduct in sexual
matters have evidenced an utter lack of power to control their
sexual impulses and who as a result are likely to attack or injure
(qtd. in Swanson 234). State legislatures also recognized that addi-
tional information on the nature of sexual pathologies was neces-
sary. In 1953, the state legislature in California funded a research
program at the University of California in San Francisco to study
the aetiology of sexual psychopathologies (Sex Psychopaths).
Similar funds were bestowed upon New Yorks Sex Delinquency
Research Project and New Jerseys Diagnostic Center, both of
which analysed incarcerated sex offenders, as well as upon research
145
projects in Nevada, Oregon, and Pennsylvania.

Revue canadienne detudes americaines 40 (2010)

Perceptions of a wave of sex crimes were furthered by an explosion
of ctional and non-ctional portrayals of maniac killers and sexual
perverts in books and lms throughout the 1940s and 1950s (see
Jenkins, ch. 3). The concerns about foreign threats and political
saboteurs that had characterized the earlier literature associated
with the red menace were replaced by worries over internal
threats from a dysfunctional body politic. Psychoanalytic case his-
tories of actual psychopaths, such as Lindners Rebel without a Cause
(1944), Fredric Werthams The Show of Violence (1949), and Curtis
Boks Star Wormwood (1959), became bestsellers. Other case histories
appeared in David Riesmans Faces in the Crowd (1952), Karpmans
The Sexual Offender and His Offenses (1954), and David Abrahamsen,
The Psychology of Crime (1960). As Life magazine explained in a 1957
series of articles on criminal behaviour,

The shocking, lurid march of crime in the United States is

constantly recorded in a torrent of words and pictures. Yet few
Americans have a clear picture of the staggering total effect of
crime in the nation or of the problem that confronts every citizen
in dealing with it. (Heiskell 46)
 Such concerns were soon translated into ctional accounts, stories
that borrowed liberally from real criminal cases. In a 1950 New
York Times article, Alfred Hitchcock himself signalled this shift,
arguing that the suspense drama is being smoked out of its old
haunts. I think that we must forget about espionage and rediscover
more personal sorts of menace (Hitchcock, Master 123). Holly-
Canadian Review of American Studies 40 (2010)

wood producers offered their own version of the psychopath in

lms such as Knock on Any Door (1949), The Sniper (1952), and While
the City Sleeps (1956), and Lindners case histories became the
inspiration for both Nicholas Rays Rebel without a Cause (1955) and
Hubert Cornelds Pressure Point (1962). Similar images of the psy-
chopath were also offered in best-selling novels such as Charles
Jacksons Outer Edges (1950), Jim Thompsons The Killer inside Me
(1952), and William Marchs The Bad Seed (1954).

This connection between crime ction and real crime drama is best
exemplied in the work of Robert Bloch. Originally a crafter of
supernatural tales in the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft, Bloch rst
experimented with the crime genre in his 1943 short story, Yours
Truly, Jack the Ripper, a ctional portrayal of the most famous
serial killer of all. Blochs successful 1947 novel The Scarf continued
146 his exploration of the psychopathic personality, telling the tale of
a budding novelist, Daniel Morley, whose high school seduction
by his English teacher leaves him with a profound rage against
women. Desperate to exorcize this memory, Morley spends his
adult years murdering a series of lovers, using the maroon scarf
with which his former teacher had once bound him. Blochs deci-
sion to use the rst-person narrative to explore the workings of
his characters mind parallels the deciphering of the psychopathic
mind in the litany of true case histories published concurrently.
In fact, psychiatrist Wertham favourably reviewed Blochs novel in
the pages of the American Journal of Psychotherapy, claiming that
in terms of scientic accuracy and good writing in general, this is
a book to be recommended (qtd. in Larson 69). Like many other
novelists and screenwriters, Bloch readily borrowed from actual
cases to construct his tales. For his most famous novel, Bloch turned
to the shocking story of Ed Gein, a fty-one-year-old Wisconsin
farmhand who was arrested in 1957 for the murder of two local
women. When authorities searched his home, they discovered the
severed remains of countless other bodies exhumed from a local
cemeteryten skins of human heads, neatly separated from the
skull; assorted pieces of human skin, some between the pages of
magazines, some made into small belts, some used to upholster
seats; [and] a box of noses (Portrait 39). Geins house of
horrors, according to Life magazine, was the most macabre of
horror stories, one that gave Americans everywhere a grim aware-
ness that what had happened in an obscure Wisconsin town might
have happened anywhere (House 25). As tales of his odd
behaviour unfolded in newspapersfrom his pathological relation-
ship with his dead mother, whose bedroom remained completely
untouched, to his fashioning of a vest made from female esh
he often donned late at nightGein, who was committed to the
Wisconsin State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, became a
symbol of the murder spree [dotting] the pages of crime annals
in the U.S. (Murder 3).

Bloch was aware that case histories of deviants such as Gein had
captured the national imagination and, after reading accounts of
the Wisconsin mans crimes, quickly transformed his story into the
1959 novel Psycho. In so doing, Bloch retraced a decade-long dis-
cussion about the psychopathfrom the psychoanalytic under-
standing of the aetiology of psychopathology to the assumed link
between political and sexual deviance. Indeed, Bloch argued that
his story was inspired not by Gein himself but by the murders he
147
had committed. According to Bloch, he, in fact, did not know any
details of Geins life when writing Psycho and only realized after-

Revue canadienne detudes americaines 40 (2010)

wards that Gein, like Norman Bates, was schizoid, that he had a
mother xation, that he had lost his mother . . . and that he was
a transvestite (Bloch, Companion 69). But Bloch admitted that
he was familiar with the literature on the psychopathology of
mass murder and that his story closely followed such examples.
Intrigued by the notion that a small-town community was unaware
of Geins activities, Bloch turned the farmhand into a fat, middle-
aged hotel proprietor (Bloch, Psycho 176) who, after having
jealously murdered his mother, relieves his guilt by internalizing
her personality and then directing his rage masochistically upon
himself and sadistically upon motel guests such as young Mary
Crane. As depicted by Bloch, Norman Bates is a compendium of
the traits used by psychiatrists to diagnose the psychopath. Bates
is an alcoholic prone to fall into drunken stupors, a misogynist
whose anger stems from his sexual impotence, and a transvestite
who is addicted to pornography. Indeed, Bates is a murderer who
is neither woman nor man (Bloch, Once 229). Bates is also overly
moralistic in his attitudes toward sex but driven to perversions
such as voyeurism, excessive masturbation, and possibly homo-
sexuality, a condition that was assumed to reveal a crippled ego
 simultaneously dominated by an overly harsh conscience and by
a ood of perverse desires. Like the psychopathic personality
described in Cleckleys The Mask of Sanity, Bates is less an actual
human being than a constructed automaton, someone who is, as
Bloch says, able to pretend sanity (Psycho 217). Similarly, like the
authoritarian personality whose inability to understand the outside
Canadian Review of American Studies 40 (2010)

world led to a reliance on superstition, Bates is driven by a belief

in mystical forces and the occult. Paranoid and often overcome by
sadistic impulses but also meticulous in cleaning up the remains of
his victims, Bates exhibits traits that align him with the distorted
personality that had plunged Europe into turmoil. As Bloch puts
it, Bates is given to perversions in the time-honored tradition of
the Nazi death camps (qtd. in Rebello 13). In this sense, Bates
became the exemplar of the political and sexual deviant depicted
by the psychoanalytic community, in the pages of national news-
papers, and within the entertainment industry. As Bloch himself
argues, Psycho worked because the story was right for the time
(Companion 68).

Alfred Hitchcocks Psycho

148 Hitchcock was well aware that his translation of Blochs novel
followed this trend. Consequently, he insisted that his version of
Psycho was not a case history told in a documentary manner like
the litany of psychoanalytic tales littering bookshelves (Hitchcock,
On Style 294). But the changes he made to Blochs narrative
belie his insistence that he is uninterested in exploring the causes
of deviance. In particular, Hitchcock foregrounds the psychiatric
evaluation of Norman at the end of the lm, choosing to have a
psychiatrist present his ndings through an extended monologue
to a group of passive listeners instead of having Sam, the dead
heroines boyfriend, provide the translation, as Bloch does in his
novel. Hitchcock recognized that audience reception of Normans
story hinged on acceptance of the psychiatrists evaluation. In
fact, after Simon Oakland, the actor who played the psychiatrist,
completed the scene, Hitchcock went over and shook the actors
hand, saying Thank you very much, Mr. Oakland. Youve just
saved my picture (qtd. in Rebello 128). Like Bloch, who con-
tributed to the popularization of psychoanalysis in the post-war
period, Hitchcock drew upon the writings of the Viennese doctor
he had read while living in London in the 1920s. Indeed, despite
the claims of many of his defenders, Hitchcock helped to contribute
to the triumph of the therapeutic, offering sympathetic portraits
of psychotherapy in Spellbound and The Wrong Man and using
Freudian language in Notorious, Marnie, and Frenzy. Moreover, like
Bloch, Hitchcock was concerned with the apparent link between
sexual and political deviance. In Rope, for instance, Hitchcock con-
nects the homosexual desires of his two main characters to their
remorseless killing of their friend and to their proto-Nietzschean
defence of authoritarianism, a theme similarly found in North by
Northwest. As a refugee of both England and Germany, Hitchcock
meditated on the horric crimes committed in the name of fas-
cism and offered to contribute to a British documentary on the
Holocaust, a project that never came to fruition. But the extended
shower scene in Psycho, which Bloch limits to only a few sentences,
visually recalls those crimes overseas.

Unlike Bloch, who portrays Bates as a slovenly middle-aged man

with obvious dysfunctions, Hitchcock references popular charac-
terizations of the psychopath as a predatory yet innocuous gure,
very difcult to discern publicly. In choosing Anthony Perkins to
play the lead role, Hitchcock made Norman a much younger and
much more sympathetic character, echoing most criminal accounts
that stressed the abnormal normality of the psychopath. Fur-
149
thermore, Perkinss appearance parallels most accounts of the
psychopath as a particular physical type; as psychiatrist Lindner

Revue canadienne detudes americaines 40 (2010)

explained, the psychopath was lither, more agile, trim, cat-like
in his movements, inclined to appear more youthful (Lindner,
Psychopathic 621) than most imagined. Hitchcock also empha-
sizes Normans fragile personality; in particular, his often laboured
speech. In the parlour scene between Marion and Norman, Hitch-
cock highlights what psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley referred to as
the psychopaths semantic aphasiaa disorder of speech in which
ideas were difcult to convey and in which the words that were
uttered did not successfully communicate anything meaningful.
Eating in an ofce is just too ofcious, Norman tells Marion as
well as explaining to her that the expression eats like a bird
itits a fals-fals-fals-falsity. But more important than his speech
patterns, Normans overall behaviour highlights his severe dys-
function. From his meticulousness in cleaning the bloodied bath-
room to his compulsive need to change the linen on the beds in
the unused motel rooms, Norman suffers from a heightened but
dysfunctional super-ego that instils in him a thankless sense of
discipline but no compassion. Hitchcock stresses Normans vio-
lent oscillation in sentiment, especially his sympathetic advice to
Marion, which regresses into a vociferous outburst at her words
 about his mother. Lonely and anxious but lled with resentment
toward outsiders, Norman emerges as a compendium of the traits
that characterized the Cold War psychopath.

In this way, even more than Bloch, Hitchcock makes mental health
the focus of his lm. Most famously, Hitchcock extends the opening
Canadian Review of American Studies 40 (2010)

story involving Marion Crane, a struggling young woman who,

because of her boyfriends unwillingness to commit, steals forty-
thousand dollars from the ofce where she works. Structurally,
Hitchcocks extending her story makes the impact of her murder
even more startling; but more importantly, as Raymond Bellour
has argued, Hitchcock draws an implicit connection between her
psychological state and Normans (240). According to Bellour,
Psycho contains two narratives that eventually bleed into one
another: one concerning a neurotic condition that culminates in the
crime of theft and one concerning a psychotic condition that culmi-
nates in the crime of murder. Marions narrative represents a muted
version of Normans own story; as Norman himself explains,
Were all in our private trapsclamped in them. And none of
us can ever get out. Marion is involved in an illicit sexual relation-
ship with a soon-to-be-divorced hardware-store owner whose
150 nancial failings dampen her hopes of marriage. Equally impor-
tant, she has no family upon which to fall back, except for her
sister, who does not readily understand her predicament. Choosing
to steal the deposit with which a lecherous customer entrusts her,
Marion transgresses the law to escape her miserable condition,
a decision in which she seems to take perverse pleasure as she
fantasizes about the reactions of her employer and ofce mates.
Psychologically unstable yet deliberate enough to evade the author-
ities, Marion emerges as the mildest of social deviants, unable, until
she meets Norman, to control her immediate impulses. Norman,
of course, represents the extreme version, a composite of traits
(voyeurism, compulsive masturbation, sado-masochism, porno-
graphic fetishism, and possibly homosexuality) that comprised the
psychopath. But, by intentionally mirroring Marion and Norman
in the parlour scene just before her gruesome murder, Hitchcock
suggests that the line between neurosis and psychosis is quite
porousboth conditions exhibit perversions found in everyone.
According to Hitchcock, Norman is not the only one guilty of such
pleasures; the audiences enjoyment of the lm taps into their own
desires to become Peeping Tom[s] (qtd. in Truffaut 266). Psy-
chopathology was, for Hitchcock, an endemic problem; as Bates
explains to Marion, We all go a little mad sometimes.
Of course, Normans madness runs deeper than that of other
characters, originating in the crime of matricide. As the psychiatrist
in the lm explains, Matricide is probably the most unbearable
crime of allmost unbearable for the son who commits it. By
linking Normans murderous aggression to his killing of his
mother, Hitchcock drew upon a larger discussion in the early Cold
War about the fragility of motherchild relations. In his 1941 study
of criminal behaviour, Dark Legend, psychologist Wertham, for
instance, argued that the appropriate mythological framework
through which to view contemporary culture was not the story of
Oedipus but the story of Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and
Clytemnestra, who, according to Greek legend, avenged the mur-
der of his father at the hands of Clytemnestras lover, Aegisthus,
by killing his mother. Designating the condition the Orestes com-
plex, Wertham contended that the dening impulse within man
was not patricide but matricide; that is, the compulsive need to
redeem the paternal legacy by punishing the mother for appar-
ent transgressions against the father (Wertham). According to
Wertham, as the power and inuence of American women in-
creased, more and more men would adopt affectionate attitudes
toward their emasculated fathers and adopt violently hostile feel-
151
ings toward their mothers. The most inuential translation of the
Orestes complex was writer Philip Wylies 1942 national bestseller

Revue canadienne detudes americaines 40 (2010)

Generation of Vipers, in which he coined the term momism to warn
against the psychologically destructive inuence over-protective
mothers had on their children. Depicting modern mothers as domi-
neering gures, Wylie connected the alarming rise in morally weak,
emotionally dependent, and sexually confused men to the reign
of tyrannical mothers who had taken possession of the spirit
(Generation 209) of their husbands and sons. His fears were derived
from two related historical transformations. First, Wylie, whom
Bloch admitted he esteemed (Once 220) as a writer, was only one
of many outspoken critics to bemoan the social and economic
changes during and after World War II that had opened avenues
for increased female involvement in the workforce, in politics, and
in civil society. As many historians have noted, the dislocations of
the war, combined with the escalating costs of living and declining
male wages, encouraged many middle-class, married women to
enter the workforce and to participate in union activities, political
campaigns, and other public organizations, in what Wylie lam-
basted as the womanization of America (Wylie, Womaniza-
tion).4 Second, Wylies concerns about the movement of women
into the public sphere were paralleled by concerns about a crisis of
 masculinity, as American men had supposedly abdicated control of
the home, the neighbourhood, and the workplace to their wives.
The American man, historian Arthur Schlesinger explains in a
1958 essay titled The Crisis of American Masculinity, was found
as never before as a substitute for wife and motherchanging
diapers, washing dishes, cooking meals, and performing a whole
Canadian Review of American Studies 40 (2010)

series of what once were considered female duties (237). Wylies

and Schlesingers anecdotal fears were given professional valida-
tion by psychologists, who detailed a growing masculinity com-
plex in American women and a growing crisis in masculinity
in American men. In a litany of works, including Ferdinand
Lundbergs Modern Woman: The Lost Sex and Helene Deutschs
The Psychology of Women, Wylies fears had become conventional
wisdom.

At the root of this blurring of gender lines, according to Wylie, was

the destroying mother who had, through her controlling nature,
distorted the psychological growth of her child. Wylies turn to
the mother as the source of such dysfunction was prompted by
the rise of ego psychology in psychoanalytic circles. Originating
in the work of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott, ego psycholo-
152 gists made the pre-Oedipal moment, that is, the motherchild rela-
tionship, the cornerstone of development, arguing that the childs
successful separation from the mother, rather than just his iden-
tication with the father, was primary. In this sense, maternal
factorsfeelings of affection and well-beingwere essential, and
maternal failures in this regardover-affection, smothering, and
aggressionwere the primary sources of neurotic behaviour. This
turn to the mother as the source of psychological dysfunction was
reiterated in David Levys Maternal Overprotection, Edward Streckers
Their Mothers Sons, and Betty Friedans The Feminine Mystique.
As characterizations of Wylies tyrannical mother abounded in
the national mediavehemently referred to as the overprotective
mother, the encapsulating mother, and the overwhelming
motherone psychologist went so far as to translate the Orestes
complex into a universal condition (see, e.g., Bingham; Bundeson;
Scheinfeld). In a number of inuential books, including The Basic
Neurosis (1949) and Neurotic Counterfeit-Sex (1951), psychiatrist
Edmund Bergler argued that the key stage in the development of
the individual was not simply identication with the father in the
context of the Oedipus complex but the prehistory of that phase,
in which the newborn had to negotiate threats to its infantile mega-
lomania from the mother as caregiver. According to Bergler, the
infant maintained fantasies of omnipotence until subjected to the
painful discovery that feeding times and sleeping schedules were
regulated by the [g]iantess of the nursery (44). Forced into an
insufferably passive role, the infant either reacted sadistically to this
witch who now seemed capable of starving, devouring, poison-
ing, choking, chopping to pieces, draining and castrating him (46)
or, under the vicissitudes of the drives, reacted masochistically by
accepting, if not enjoying, such punishment. The only antidote to
this situation was identication with the father who, because of his
strength, was able to [demote] the threatening and fear-inspiring
witch (46). But the eclipse of paternal authority under the recent
accession of maternal power prevented this transition. The result,
according to Bergler, was a continued fear of the maternal image
and a libidinal attachment to the passive position of the nursery, in
what Bergler termed psychic masochism.

Berglers translation of the Orestes complex set the psychoanalytic

framework for Psycho. Indeed, Bloch acknowledged that, after writ-
ing The Scarf, he had been contacted by Bergler, who corresponded
with him about the origins of deviant behaviour and who made,
according to Bloch, acute remarks (qtd. in Larson 23) about
153
psychopathology that eventually owed into his own novel. But
Hitchcock made the notion of psychic masochism, only marginally

Revue canadienne detudes americaines 40 (2010)

depicted in Blochs book, the visual and textual leitmotif of his lm.
Throughout his career, Hitchcock meditated on the destructive role
of mothers, portraying neurotic or psychopathic men damaged by
their possessive mothers in lms such as Strangers on a Train, North
by Northwest, and The Birds. But Psycho is his most elaborate trans-
lation of the Orestes complex. Unlike those who successfully nego-
tiated the pre-Oedipal moment, disturbed individuals who never
overcame the [g]iantess of the nursery became divided subjects,
simultaneously identifying with the perceived aggressiveness of
the mother and taking libidinal enjoyment in the punishment she
inicted. As critic Michel Chion notes, the action in Hitchcocks
lm is driven by the voice of the mother, a disembodied presence
linked to no one particular gure (neither the mothers corpse nor
Normans own body) but imposing its own law nonetheless (112).
Having no adequate paternal gure through which to dethrone his
mother, Norman never overcomes his psychic masochism, develop-
ing, instead, a maternal super-ego that, operating as an externalized
representation of the castrating mother, punishes him for his trans-
gressions and (unlike the paternal super-ego that offers entrance
into the symbolic) prohibits normal psychological development.
 Consequently, Normans split psyche continuously oscillates be-
tween these two positions, at times, playing the role of the passive
infant punished by a controlling maternal presence and, at times,
acting as a sadistic gure seeking revenge. As Edmund Bergler
explains, Pseudo-aggression . . . is used as a disguise before the
tribunal of inner conscience, which accuses the defendant of libidi-
Canadian Review of American Studies 40 (2010)

nized masochistic passivity (70). The result is that, on a conscious

level, [I]t is sadistic fantasies that dominate (70). Under the vicissi-
tudes of the drives, this original psychic masochism is converted
into an impulse for revenge against the mother and her surrogates.
During the parlour scene in which Norman watches Marion eat
dinner, he associates his mother with his collection of birds, claim-
ing that she is as harmless as one of those stuffed birds. Admit-
ting that his only pastime is taxidermy and that he only likes to
practise his work upon birds because theyre kind of passive to
begin with, Norman makes the connection to his mother, who
also has been lled with sawdust. This connection is solidied at
the end of the lm, when Mrs. Bates declares her innocence,
stressing her inability to do anything except just sit and stare like
one of [Normans] stuffed birds. His compulsion to repeat his
original crime stems from the vicissitudes of his psychic masochism.
154 Owls belong to the night world, explained Hitchcock. They are
watchers, and this appeals to Perkins masochism. He knows the
birds and he knows that theyre watching him all the time (qtd.
in Truffaut 282). His killing of Marion as well as of the other young
women buried in the swamp is the product of this overwhelming
maternal super-ego. As Edmund Bergler explains, The uncon-
scious conict established in early childhood is later stenciled,
coded, and transferred with uncanny repetitiveness to innocent
outsiders, who are used as a sort of movie screen upon which to
reel off the individuals patterns (71). Norman extends his com-
parison between his mother and his birds to Marion as well, telling
her you eat like a bird. In this way, Hitchcock links Marion to
Normans mother, making her murder a repetition of his original
matricide.

Hitchcocks lm, then, centres on the rise of psychopathology in

an era supposedly witnessing the collapse of traditional gender
roles in the wake of declining paternal authority. Psycho was simply
one of many cultural documents that prioritized proper Oedipal
development as the framework for healthy character growth and
that chastised middle-class mothers for their supposed parental
failures. As the psychiatrist in the lm explains, Normans mother
was a clinging, demanding woman who engulfed her son. A
political and sexual deviant, the psychopath was an emblem of
this dysfunctional (and maternal) order. For instance, Philip Wylies
discourse on momism linked a range of abnormal psychological
conditions, including alcoholism, homosexuality, political radicalism,
and delinquency, to maternal overprotection. To quote Wylie, the
mealy look of men today was the result of too much maternal
inuence and so [was] the pinched and bafed fury in the eyes of
womankind (Generation 197). Moreover, Wylie and his supporters
in the psychoanalytic community linked the rise of momism to
the perceived emasculation of American men, the result of declin-
ing wages, increased female employment, spreading corporate and
political bureaucracies, a supposedly effeminate mass culture, and
the sexual and political emancipation of wivesa range of prob-
lems that had, according to Wylie, blurred traditional gender
lines, undermined the structure of the family, and twisted mans
naturally harmonious libidinal drives in perverse ways. As a
mixture of images of the sexual psychopath and the authoritarian
personality, Norman Bates represents the culmination of this panic
over deviant behaviour in the early Cold War.
155
But unlike Bloch and a litany of psychiatrists in the 1950s, all of
whom argued that the rehabilitation of the family would heal the

Revue canadienne detudes americaines 40 (2010)

nations psychic wounds, Hitchcock was much more pessimistic.
In Blochs novel, an emerging romance between Sam and Marions
sister Lila hints at a possible return to normative family patterns in
the wake of the transgressions of Marion and Norman. Even those
psychiatrists who went to great lengths to explain the aetiology of
psychopathologyfrom the authors of The Authoritarian Personality
to psychiatrists Lindner and Cleckleyimplored policy makers to
address this problem. For instance, psychiatrists such as Nathan
Ackerman and Don Jackson developed the family-therapy move-
ment in the 1950s, a collaboration between practising therapists
and local mental-health clinics to further research on child-rearing
practices and to provide specic diagnosis and treatment for dis-
turbed families (see Weinstein). This trend coalesced around a
1954 report issued by the Committee on the Family of the Group
for the Advancement of Psychiatry, which reiterated the link be-
tween family conditions and individual pathologies. But Hitchcock
was less than encouraged. The utter dysfunction of the psychopath,
despite the claims made by psychiatrists like Lindner, who argued
he had rehabilitated the troubled young man in Rebel without a
Cause, proved to Hitchcock the limitations of psychotherapy. As
 the psychiatrist in the lm explains, Norman Bates no longer
exists . . . the other half has taken overprobably for all time.
Indeed, Psycho is a world in which paternal authorityfrom
Normans dead father to the economically castrated Sam, to the
litany of ineffective policemenhas disappeared, and with it, all
hopes of normal family relations.
Canadian Review of American Studies 40 (2010)

The Psychopath in the Age of Rebellion

Ironically, by the time Hitchcock produced his cinematic por-
trayal of the psychopath, the psychiatric community had already
rescinded its original analysis. Throughout the 1950s, psychiatrists
chipped away at the notion of the psychopath as a clinical entity
by challenging the language of sexual psychopath laws, the guide-
lines used by examination boards, and the statutory criteria used to
identify sexual psychopaths. As psychiatrist Philip Roche explained
in 1958, The term psychopathic personality is no longer re-
garded by psychiatry as meaningful; yet it will probably remain
embalmed . . . in the statutes of several states where the pursuit
of demons disguised as sexual psychopaths affords a glimpse of
a 16th-century approach to mental illness (qtd. in Kittrie 171).
156 In 1952, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psy-
chiatric Association used the term sociopath instead of psycho-
path to refer to anti-social behavioural disorders, claiming that the
term was more limited, as well as more specic in its application
(Committee 38). The manual also used the phrase sexual devia-
tion instead of the broad classication psychopathic personality
with pathologic sexuality as a way to specify the type of the
pathologic behavior (39), instead of assuming an implicit connec-
tion among all such behaviours. By the late 1960s, psychiatrists
such as Otto Kernberg began to refer to borderline personality
organization or anti-social personality disorder (641) to clarify
those forms of pathology once dened by the concept of the
psychopathic personality.

Equally important, other criticisms emerged from outside the

psychiatric community. In 1950, criminologist Edwin Sutherland
published an article, The Diffusion of Sexual Psychopath Laws,
in which he argued that fears over the psychopath had been falsely
generated by the national media and the psychiatric community,
both of which had professional interests in pressuring state legisla-
tures into action. Similarly, sociologist Paul Tappan, who had been
hired as a consultant to the New Jersey Commission for the Study
of the Habitual Sex Offender, offered a sceptical response to sexual
psychopath laws, arguing in his 1950 report, The Habitual Sex
Offender, that the psychopath was not a classiable entity and that
the widespread passage of such laws reected a media-constructed
panic rather than an actual statistical rise in sexual offences. These
individual criticisms soon found their way into a larger national
discussion. The anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s, for instance,
successfully challenged the theoretical claims of psychoanalysis,
the stigmatization of mentally ill patients, and the forced institu-
tionalization of convicted criminals. Works by psychiatrists such as
R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz and social theorists such as Erving
Goffman and Michel Foucault as well as by ction writers such as
Ken Kesey and William Burroughs challenged traditional notions of
mental illness and criticized the prevailing system of psychiatric
institutions that infringed on the rights of patients. Under such
criticisms, federal courts throughout the 1960s limited the states
power to incarcerate mentally ill patients for indeterminate periods,
ensured that accused sexual criminals were given adequate legal
counsel, reduced the inuence of psychiatric examining boards on
criminal sentencing, and limited the use of drugs and psycho-
surgery on troubled patients (see Jenkins, ch. 5). The result was a
157
sharp decline in the number of criminals institutionalized under
sexual psychopath laws.

Revue canadienne detudes americaines 40 (2010)

But more importantly, Anthony Perkinss sympathetic portrayal of
Norman Bates, despite Hitchcocks sinister depiction of Bates in the
nal frames of the lm, in which he superimposes the image of a
skull over Normans face, signalled a shift in certain perceptions of
the psychopath. The cultural rebellion that characterized the 1960s
brought a new image of the psychopath to the fore. Arguing that
psychoanalysis merely reconciled the individual to a society domi-
nated by economic concentrations of power, political bureaucracies,
and a decrepit mass culture, theorists like Herbert Marcuse and
Erich Fromm, in works such as One-Dimensional Man and Man for
Himself, challenged the assumption that a healthy personality was
only produced by the internalization of paternal authority. Simi-
larly, a number of writers, especially those associated with the
Beat Generation, challenged the normative assumptions of psycho-
analysis, arguing in works such as Allen Ginsbergs poem Howl
and William Burroughss Naked Lunch that the madness of the
psychopath was the only legitimate form of cultural rebellion.
Most famously, writer Norman Mailer, in his inuential 1957 essay
The White Negro: Supercial Reections on the Hipster, made
 the psychopath into a folk hero for the emerging counterculture.
According to Mailer, The psychopath may indeed be the per-
verted and dangerous front-runner of a new kind of personality
which could become the central expression of human nature
before the twentieth century is over (345). Indeed, as madness,
irrationality, sexual experimentation, and schizophrenia became
Canadian Review of American Studies 40 (2010)

key words for a generation in revolt against what Erich Fromm

referred to as the sane society, Norman Bates became more and
more an image of cultural rebellion. The psychopath, as the key
symbol of the age of McCarthyism, re-emerged in an entirely new
form in an age of discontent.

Notes
1 On the production of the lm, see Rebello.
2 The history of the concept of the psychopath is detailed in Millon,
Simonsen, and Birket-Smith.
3 On the spread of sexual psychopath laws, see Hacker and Frym.
4 On the changing role of women in post-war America, see Meyerowitz.

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